Determining the real-time condition of complex machines such as ground vehicles or aircraft may be desirable for purposes of keeping an operator of such a machine apprised of problems, and to ensure maintenance is properly undertaken, preferably prior to the point at which a component fails. There is increased interest in condition-based maintenance (CBM) systems that collect sensor information in real-time from strategically placed sensors located on the machine, and continually execute analytics on the collected sensor information during operation of the machine to ensure the components are operating within desired parameters. If it is determined that a component is operating outside of desired parameters, the CBM system can generate and display an alert to the operator.
Typically, the CBM system is a combination of hardware components and interrelated complex software components. Altering any aspects of the CBM analytics, such as altering the criteria used to determine whether an alert should be presented to an operator of a vehicle, requires modification of the CBM software, recompilation and debugging of the CBM software, downloading the CBM software to the machine, and re-booting the machine to implement the new CBM software. Modifying the CBM software requires a relatively skilled software technician who is both knowledgeable in the particular computer language in which the CBM software is written, as well as the particular CBM software being modified, so that the modification does not result in unexpected problems. Such skilled technicians may be rare, resulting in desired modifications of the CBM analytics of a CBM system being delayed. Often, the user of the CBM system may have no capability of modifying the CBM system and, thus, must wait for the manufacturer of the CBM system to schedule the modification.
After the modification has been successfully implemented and tested, rolling out the modification to fleets of vehicles may be very time-consuming, and disruptive, such that each CBM system must be shut down, loaded with new CBM software, and then re-booted. This may be impractical in certain environments, such as a war zone.